Greywaren, page 1
to every reader who ever woke with flowers or feathers
Yet if you take the time to look closely at your subject, to analyze the shapes of shadows and their edges, and to record them in terms of value, you will achieve a convincing likeness.
—William L. Maughan, The Artist’s Complete Guide to Drawing the Head
It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.
—James McNeill Whistler
If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.
—René Magritte
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Maggie Stiefvater
Copyright
At the beginning of this story, years and years ago, two dreamers arrived at paradise.
Niall Lynch and Mór Ó Corra had just bought a beautiful, secret piece of Virginia countryside. Sloping, open fields. Oak-covered foothills. And in the distance, the ghostly Blue Ridge Mountains acting as sentry. It felt like a magic trick to Niall and Mór, the acquisition of this verdant stronghold. Yes, the farmhouse at its heart was full of the towering stash of the hoarder who’d died before they arrived. And the multitude of outbuildings that gave the parcel its name—the Barns—were in even sorrier shape, every one of them knock-kneed and sloughing paint.
But to Niall and Mór it was a new kingdom.
“Sure, it’ll come round,” Niall said, full of his usual optimism.
Niall was a charming young buck, handsome, persuasive, fast-talking. If the rubbish inside the house and the barns could be convinced to move itself, he was the man to do it.
Mór (not yet called Mór then) said, “We’ll have to take care the baby doesn’t get lost in all these weeds.”
Mór was a tough young hero, unsentimental, unflinching. A year before, she’d chopped her golden hair to chin length so it wouldn’t get in her way, and a month before, she’d done the same to her past.
Niall smiled that big, sudden grin of his, tucked his long hair behind his ear, made himself pretty for her to stare at. “Do you like it?”
Shifting young Declan in her arms, she turned her flinty-eyed gaze over the property. It was everything Niall had said it would be. It was lovely. It was enormous. It was miles from the closest neighbor and oceans away from the closest family.
But that wasn’t the most important thing to her.
She said, “I won’t know ’til I’ve slept, will I?”
Both Niall and Mór were dreamers—literally. They would fall asleep and, sometime later, wake with their dreams made real. Magic! Rare magic, too—they’d never met anyone else who could do it … or at least, no one else who would admit to it, and was that really a surprise? Easy to see how someone with bad intentions might try to exploit a dreamer for profit.
In truth, exploitation was easier said than done. Dreaming was a slippery business. Niall and Mór often lost their way while hiking through their own subconscious. They would intend to dream of, say, money, and instead wake up with, say, handfuls of sticky notes with the words pound and dollar printed on them.
The most useful dreams were focused dreams.
The most focused dreams were dreams of the forest.
The Forest.
On the surface, the Forest seemed much like an ordinary deciduous forest, but when Mór stood inside it, she could tell its roots went far deeper. Past dirt. Past rock. Past anything humans had ever seen, looking not for water but for something else. When she visited it in her dreams, Mór could tell that something sentient lived within the Forest, but she never saw what it was. She only heard it. Or felt it.
Whatever it was, it was very interested in her.
She was very interested in it.
“Sure, don’t worry,” Niall told Mór, reaching out a hand for hers. “You’ll find the Forest here.”
Because he, too, dreamt of the Forest. It was interested in him, too.
(Niall was interested in the Forest, but he was mainly interested in Mór.)
He’d done his best to find a place where the dreaming was good and clear, where it was easy to choose to visit the Forest each night. Part of him had hoped she might also fall in love with the beauty of the place, with the promise of what their life together would look like, but he knew what she really wanted.
So that first night, Mór dreamt, and Niall waited. Finally, as the sun rose, Mór joined her young partner on the farmhouse’s rickety porch. Niall held out his arms for Declan and hugged him as they looked out over the misty fields.
He didn’t ask Mór if she’d dreamt of the Forest that night. He knew. They dreamt of the Forest; the Forest dreamt of them.
“I heard a word in the Forest last night, love,” he said. “It wasn’t English and it wasn’t Irish, either.”
“I saw a word last night, too,” Mór replied. “Written on a rock.”
She wrote it in the pollen on the railing just as he said it aloud:
Greywaren.
Art crime used to be funny.
Not ha-ha funny, but strange funny. A lot of crime goes in and out of fashion, but art crime is always in. One would think that art lovers would be the least likely to tolerate theft or forgery, but in fact, they’re often the ones who find it the most intriguing. It’s art appreciation on steroids. Art appreciation as a board game, a team sport. A lot of people will never steal a statue or forge a painting, but a lot of people find it interesting when someone else does. Unlike when seeing someone stealing a handbag or a baby, a reasonable number of onlookers might secretly root for the thief.
The stakes never seemed that high. Art was valuable, but it was never a matter of life or death.
But the world had changed.
Now, if someone owned a piece of art, it meant that someone else didn’t.
And that was a matter of life or death.
No one so much as glanced at Bryde as he headed into the Museum of Fine Arts. He was just a tawny-haired man in a gray jacket too light for Boston’s winter weather, dwarfed by the scale of the column-fronted museum as he jogged lightly up the stairs, hands in pockets, shoulders shrugged against the cold. He did not look like someone who had destroyed valuable things in the recent past or like someone who intended to steal valuable things in the near future, although he was both.
Desperate times, etc.
It had only been thirty-six hours since tens of thousands of people and animals had fallen asleep all over the world. They fell all at once, all together. It hadn’t mattered if they were jogging down the sidewalk or tossing their child in the air or stepping onto an escalator: They fell asleep. Planes dropped from the sky. Trucks rummaged off bridges. Seabirds rained into the ocean. It did not matter if the sleepers were in a cockpit or behind the wheel of a bus; it did not matter if the other passengers were screaming; the sleepers kept on sleeping. Why? No one knew.
Well, some knew.
Bryde walked in his quick, neat way to the ticket counter. He blew on his cold fingers and shivered a little. His bright eyes looked here, there, back again, just long enough to note the guard lingering by the toilets and the docent leading a group into another room.
The young woman behind the ticket counter didn’t look up from her screen. She asked, “General admission ticket?”
On the news, a rotating cast of experts had used phrases like metabolic disturbances or zoonotic disease or toxic gas inversions to explain all the comatose people and animals, but these morphed as the experts struggled to come up with an explanation that also included the hundreds of windmills, cars, and appliances that had also failed. Did it have something to do, one expert postulated, with the billions of dollars of industrial sabotage that had been happening on the Eastern Seaboard? Perhaps it was all an attack on industry! Perhaps the government would reveal more data in the morning!
But in the morning, no new information came.
No one claimed responsibility. The sleepers kept sleeping.
“I need a ticket for the Vienna exhibit,” Bryde said.
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“They’re sold out until March,” the counter attendant replied, in the tone of someone who had repeated this many times already. “I can put your email on a waiting list.”
The once-in-a-lifetime traveling exhibition of Vienna Secession artists had sold out the day it was announced. It was bound to. At its center was Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, a painting that never left its home country. The Kiss is a knockout of a painting that most people have seen even if they don’t think they have. It features two lovers completely consumed by both a gilded blanket and each other. The man kisses the woman on the cheek. He wears ivy in his hair; his hands touch the woman prayerfully. The woman kneels serenely on flowers; her expression is certain she’s adored. How adored? Hard to say. Previous Klimts, less famous, had sold for one hundred and fifty million dollars.
“I need to get in today,” Bryde said.
“Sir—” The counter attendant lifted her gaze to Bryde, looking at him for the first time. She hesitated. She stared too long. At his eyes, his face.
“Bryde,” she whispered.
It was not only the sleepers whose lives had changed the day planes fell from the sky. The dreamers—far less numerous than the sleepers—had lost their ability to take things from their dreams, too. Many didn’t know it yet, because they dreamt so rarely. And many had already been failing (at dreaming, at living) for a long time.
Bryde had visited some of them in their dreams.
“The Vienna exhibition,” Bryde repeated quietly.
Now there was no hesitation. The counter attendant took her own badge from around her neck. “Put your, um, finger, over the photo.”
As he walked away, looping the lanyard over his neck, she put her fingers to her mouth and stifled a little cry.
It can be a powerful thing, to know one isn’t alone.
A few minutes later, Bryde calmly lifted The Kiss from the wall of the busy Vienna Secession exhibit. He took it with the quiet certainty of someone who was supposed to be taking a painting, which is perhaps why none of the other visitors realized anything was amiss at first.
Then the weight-sensitive alarm began to scream.
Thief, thief, thief, the piercing electronic tone warned.
Now the visitors stared.
Bryde staggered back with the painting, which was every bit as big as he was. What a piece of art this scene was: this light-haired man with a hawklike nose, something about his proportions neat and predictable, and this beautiful painting, with its own elegant balance.
The corner of the frame hit the floor. He began to drag it toward the exit.
Now it was obvious that the painting was being stolen. This was not how one carried priceless masterpieces.
And yet the onlookers did not stop Bryde; they watched. That was what one owed art, after all, wasn’t it? They watched him stop long enough to rummage something that looked like a paper airplane from his jacket and hurl it at a docent hurrying into the exhibit. As soon as the plane struck the docent’s chest, it melted into an oozy coating that glued him to the floor. Another docent got a faceful of glittering powder that shrieked and sparked when it touched her skin.
A third docent skidded to a halt as grass and brambles grew rapidly from the floor, released from an ordinary-looking tennis ball Bryde had tossed from his pocket.
Bryde struggled farther on.
At each turn, he faced more guards, and at each turn, he found yet more odd knickknacks in his pockets to distract them, like he was pulling from a gallery of works by disparate artists. The objects were beautiful, strange, frightening, mind-bending, loud, apologetic, shameful, enthusiastic—all gifts collected in the last thirty-six hours from those who’d thought they were alone before Bryde had reached out to them. In the past, he could have dreamt new weapons to keep the guards at bay, but not now. He had to make do with gifted dreams from before.
But he did not have enough of them to get him out of the museum.
There were more walkie-talkies crackling from deeper in the building and more alarms shouting and ever so many stairs left to go.
He was nowhere near escape.
One could not simply stroll into one of the largest museums in the world, select a Klimt from the wall, and drag it out.
It was bound to fail from the start.
“Don’t you want them to wake up?” Bryde snarled to the bystanders.
These words landed more powerfully than any of the dreamt gadgets had. They invoked those not there, the sleepers, who slept and slept and slept. In loved ones’ spare rooms. In nurseries with doors left hopefully cracked, the baby monitors’ batteries running dead. In geriatric wards devoted to sleepers no one had claimed as their own.
A handful of onlookers rushed forward to help Bryde carry the painting.
Now it was truly a work of art, Bryde and this group of museumgoers shouldering The Kiss past the displays describing Klimt’s process, the arduous journey this painting had made already, the acts of rebellion Klimt performed again and again in his artistic life.
Out they strove, five, six, seven people carrying the painting as far as the museum’s front entrance, other museumgoers pitching in to blockade the guards.
On the grand stairs of the MFA, the police were waiting, guns raised.
Now that he had run out of gifted dreams, Bryde was just a man with a famous painting held tight in his grip. It took only a few officers to relieve him of it. Really, it was not surprising that the theft had failed. It was surprising that it had taken so long to fail. But that was art for you: hard to predict what would stick and what wouldn’t.
As they escorted Bryde in cuffs toward a parked cruiser, he stumbled.
“Easy there,” said one of the officers, in a not unkindly tone.
“No need for anyone to get hurt,” said the other officer.
Behind them, The Kiss was whisked back into the museum. The farther it got from Bryde, the slower his steps became.
“What were you thinking?” the first officer asked. “You can’t just walk in there and take a painting, man.”
Bryde said, “It was the only thing I could think of.”
He no longer looked like the person who’d walked into the museum earlier. All the intensity was gone from his eyes. He sagged to the ground, a man in a jacket empty of dreams.
“One day,” he told the officers, “you’ll sleep, too.”
Asleep.
Everyone wants to be powerful.. Ads tell every consumer: We are important and seen.. Teachers tell every student: I believe in you.. Embrace your power.. Be your best self.. You can have it all.. These are lies.. Power is like gasoline and salt.. It seems plentiful but there is only so much to go around.. Sharp blades want power to gain room to cut.. Dull blades want power so sharp blades will not cut them.. Sharp blades want power to do what they are meant to do.. Dull blades want power to just take up room in the drawer.. We live in a disgusting world.. The drawer is full of ugly blades made for nothing..
—NATHAN FAROOQ-LANE,
The Open Edge of the Blade, page 8
Ho hey, the working day.
Declan Lynch woke early. He didn’t eat breakfast, because breakfast was the meal most likely to upset his stomach. He did drink coffee, even though it did upset his stomach, because without the urgent mewling of the coffee maker in the morning he wouldn’t have a compelling reason to get out of bed on time. In any case, Matthew had once said that morning smelled like coffee, so now it had to continue smelling like coffee.
After coffee was started, he called Jordan Hennessy—her workday would be ending now, just as his was starting. As the phone rang in his ear, he carefully wiped coffee grounds off the counter and fingerprints from the light switch. He liked most things about his Boston apartment, especially the Fenway location, barely a mile away from Jordan, but the older building would never be as pathologically clean as the soulless place he’d left behind in DC. Declan liked things neat. He rarely got his way.
“Pozzi,” Jordan said warmly.
“You still awake?”
This was a bigger question than it had been just a few days ago.
“Shockingly,” she replied. “Stunningly. The crowd watches with anticipation; even the coaches have no idea what to expect.”
Awake, awake—why was she awake when so many others were sleeping? What would he do if tomorrow she wasn’t?
“I want to see you tonight,” he said.
